April 16, 2016

"It seems that she herself never actually said this ... but she indeed believed that communism had the potential to radically transform the way human beings loved.... Capitalist egoism and notions of ownership had stunted the potential of love and sex, degraded women in romantic relationships and had generally caused more hurt feelings and crimes of passion than entirely necessary.... The first time I read this, it seemed to me that my generation of fellow Americans had ostensibly achieved that liberation; it appeared that we did not insist on exclusive possession of one another.... At left-leaning UC Berkeley, was I living the communist dream that my favorite Bolshevik had wished for future generations? No, I realized after this initial period of contemplation, I wasn’t.... She was an adherent to a philosophy whose perhaps most fundamental assertion is that human beings are obligated to have concern for the wellbeing of other human beings, kin and stranger alike... Hookup culture in 2016 is premised on the opposite: the notion of owing absolutely nothing to the people you sleep with, notwithstanding whether the relationship is entirely superficial, deeply intimate or somewhere in between.... Fixing hookup culture doesn’t mean reverting to an insistence on monogamy, nor does it require us to incite a full-blown communist revolution. But surely at UC Berkeley, at least, we might be able to adopt some communist thinking — and be a lot happier for it."

An effort by a group of Stanford University students to restore a Western civilization class requirement has been decisively rejected by the student body, with voting results released Monday showing it mustering less than 15 percent support.

The ballot initiative was promoted by members of the school’s conservative-leaning Stanford Review. If passed, it would have called for Stanford to require that all freshmen complete a two-quarter course covering “the politics, history, philosophy, and culture of the Western world.” Stanford once possessed a similar requirement, but eliminated it after a student campaign in the 1980s that denounced it as fostering racism, sexism, and other perfidious -isms.

The West is filled with millions of people like Alex, all of them waiting for Someone. They are the product of a multi-decade campaign to deliberately empty people of their culture; to actually make them ashamed of it. They were purposely drained of God, country, family like chickens so they could be stuffed with the latest narrative of the progressive meme machine. The Gramscian idea was to produce a blank slate upon which the Marxist narrative could be written.

Hookup culture in 2016 is premised on the opposite: the notion of owing absolutely nothing to the people you sleep with, notwithstanding whether the relationship is entirely superficial, deeply intimate or somewhere in between...

Nonsense. A principal tenet of hookup culture is that you always call the girl a cab when you're done with her.

"...a philosophy whose perhaps most fundamental assertion is that human beings are obligated to have concern for the wellbeing of other human beings..."

Except the kulaks, wreckers, hoarders, bourgeoisie, anti-revolutionaries, wrongthinkers, class enemies... We'll kill those by the tens of millions. But yes, otherwise, concern for the wellbeing of other human beings.

The problem with the hookup culture is that men and women are not the same. Most of those "sexual assaults" that the Obama DoEd has been trying so hard to criminalize involve the guy having less involvement after sex than the gal. They get together, and while he may be nice at first, ultimately, he is not sticking around. Then, the women do what women often due, which is to get even and make him pay. They try to be liberated and the like, but that isn't their nature. Human females, by and large, expect some emotional entanglement from or before sex, and do so for a reason, which is that for most of our history, the females needed the fathers' of their children involved in providing resources to raise their children. The females who could just screw around, with no emotional involvement were more likely to end up without a male helping out, and their children were likely therefore less likely to reproduce. Etc.

I brought up campus sexual "assaults" with a recently graduated co-ed, and her response was that two of her friends had given up their virginity to guys who had not appreciated it, and hadn't stuck around, and that somehow justified guys being expelled from college for essentially not sticking around in long term relationships with their casual bed partners. Or something like that.

Above, I suggested that the hookup culture is not really good for (many) women. But, it isn't good for men either. With the normal heterosexual mating in our species (or at least culture), there is a one-to-one relationship between males and females. Most everyone pairs up, which means that not very many are left out. But, that isn't the case in a hookup culture. Rather, some of the guys, the alphas, and fake alphas (often the PUC guys) get most of the women, and the rest of the guys get few if any. But, the women suffer with this too, because even though they have sex with the alphas, they mostly cannot nail them down into long term relationships, because of the number of other women competing for their attention. So, you have a lot of guys not getting sex, and a lot of gals getting sex, but not the guy they had sex with.

So, why go along with this? Because the lesbians in the gender studies departments have outsized power in a liberal environment, and their own mating habits tend to be more equitable (with both partners tending to have similar sexual temperaments). (If you want to become cynical in this regard, you should read The Other McCain blog).

The brain systems that motivate humans to form emotional bonds with others probably first evolved to mobilize the high-quality maternal care necessary for reproductive success in placental mammals. In these species, the helplessness of infants at birth and their dependence upon nutrition secreted from their mothers' bodies (milk) and parental body heat to stay warm required the evolution of a new motivational system in the brain to stimulate avid and sustained mothering behavior. Other types of social bonds that emerged subsequently in placental mammals, in particular monogamous bonds between breeding pairs, appear to have evolved from motivational brain systems that stimulate maternal behavior. This chapter focuses on aspects of the evolution and neurobiology of maternal and pair bonding and associated behavioral changes that may provide insights into the origins of human violence.

Why girls are pissed off when the male loses interest. The only joke about the difference between sperm banks and commercial banks is about truth.

Bruce Hayden: all good points and with campus female:male ratio now close to 2:1, the competition for alpha male attention must be crazy. I thought Tom Wolfe's "I Am Charlotte Simmons" painted a vivid and believable of that world. Horrible.

"At Yale-New Haven hospital, economist Keith Chen and psychologist Laurie Stanos taught capuchin monkeys to use money. Among other fascinating results from this study was an interesting incident where one monkey managed to steal an entire tray of money tokens and flung them into the main cage that housed all the monkeys before it could be caught. The monkeys then all scrambled for the coins. With the temporary surplus of money, allowing for expenditures beyond food, and the fact that the monkeys had no concept of saving, one of the monkeys decided to pay another monkey for sex. Since that exchange, steps were taken to assure the monkeys would no longer be able to pay one another for sexual acts."

She was an adherent to a philosophy whose perhaps most fundamental assertion is that human beings are obligated to have concern for the wellbeing of other human beings, kin and stranger alike... Hookup culture in 2016 is premised on the opposite: the notion of owing absolutely nothing to the people you sleep with

If the authoress had more deeply drunk from that gem of dialectical wisdom named Karl Marx, maybe she would have understood that the seeming opposites bolded above turn out to be the same thing.

Kollontai, by the way, was the only woman among the early Bolsheviks to have even the least bit on influence, the CPUSSR being throughout its history a notoriously male dominated political party.

Since she had crossed Lenin as a "Left Oppositionist", she got sidelined & sent out of the country as ambassador to Norway. My guess is that the only reason she survived Stalin's purges is because she was safely out of the country for them. Stalin ended up killing the large majority of the 1917 Bolshevik Party members who came into power.

Maybe these marxists should remember biology: babies, aging, STD's all are nature's way to say monogamy is good.

Or maybe just have them read Aristophenes' play Ecclesiazusae, when women take over.... and the old ladies insist on one law that says that if a man wants to sleep with a beautiful woman, he has to first sleep with an old hag, because....EQUALITY!

Important lesson here. Radical politics attracts screwed up people. They like the purity of extremism, they like the denial of the self. There's a strong element of masochism -- exaltation through denial. Susan Sontag actually has a great article on this:http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1975/02/06/fascinating-fascism/

For all the talk of "sex positivity," if you try to join a sexual subculture without sharing the mores of that culture, you're going to end up baffled and hurt.

They aren't allowed to read poetry or history or to look for love. When things go wrong they search the Marxist works for an acceptable interpretation. It's pathetic really. Men aren't women; women aren't men. But they can never say or even secretly think that. It's like watching science fiction but this is happening. They can't find the way out because they start by closing the door on tradition and the other doors they have lead into closets and cellars or aren't even doors, just painted wood false doors.

This is some of the most circular reasoning I've seen in quite some time: Sex will be as easy to get as a glass of water, and just as unimportant, in a communist state. Isn't that great! Communism also makes people care about everyone else and that's great, too. But in modern times, sex has lost all currency. It's as easy to get as a glass of water and it is just as unimportant to the participants. So let's take the communist route.

It's like Rip Van Winkel woke up, took a bunch of drugs, and tried to write a column on modern-day culture. WTF? Is she seriously arguing that making sex easy to get will make men value women more?

@Bruce Hayden and @Michael K are exactly right: women were never made for one-night stands (because ... Hello? Babies?!). The hook-up culture is killing the mental well-being of women, the family unit (because why form one?), and the forces of nature. And when the man doesn't stick around -- surprise, surprise -- and the scorned woman accuses him of rape, the hook-up culture works to destroy all trust between the sexes. Parents are now sending their sons off to college with consent and hold harmless/indemnity sex contracts. Seriously! And who could blame them?

This is all a big mistake. A big mistake. And talk about alpha and beta males! The K-12 schools are doing EVERYTHING possible to beat the alpha out of all males. No pop tart gun for you, little first-grade boy! Already in Japan, the poor betas run around with an app called "Rinka" -- an avatar w/artificial intelligence who stands in as their girlfriend. "In 15 Years We'll All Be Girls" writes Adam Carolla. Hard to argue with that proposition, though he's way off on his timeline. It's more like "15 months" or even "15 weeks."

It may be here on this blog that I saw this article called "The Dating Apocalypse." It's well worth reading, though it's terribly depressing and tragic. http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2015/08/tinder-hook-up-culture-end-of-dating

Fresh off the farm or more likely from an upper class suburb--and off to Berserkly.

And the cute young girl decides to go Commie at Cal! Who ever heard of such a thing? (Oh, maybe a gazillion people in the last 95 years). Bolshie BS permeates the atmosphere at Berkeley. It was always that way, and always will be.

As for the tall, good looking "older" guy [what is he a first year grad student? And she's a sadder and wiser--and no longer recently diddled sophomore?) well that roll in the hay was last spring. And summer came and went, and with the fall semester the older guy has found something new.

If there was a sure fire way for men and women to get together in a nurturing, loving, and enduring way, then surely some society would have hit upon the trick by now......I'm pretty sure Communist societies and Berkeley students can offer more in the way of cautionary rather than exemplary guidance in this regard, but it's important to keep trying.

One of the problems with hookup culture is that sex stimulates hormones of attachment. This means that it is easy to become attached to someone JUST from the sex, not because you like them or have anything in common or have any interest in settling down. This applies to men as well as women, but moreso to women. The result is lots of confusion about "what is love" because you have people having short-term romances without any foundation or mind-set of commitment.

"She was an adherent to a philosophy whose perhaps most fundamental assertion is that human beings are obligated to have concern for the wellbeing of other human beings, kin and stranger alike."

The fundamental problem with Communism, is that it is based on the belief that human beings can be made to feel so obligated. For Communism to work, all that is required is for every man, and every woman, to be a saint. That's all.

Capitalism, on the other hand, is based upon the assumption that humans are greedy and selfish, and are mostly motivated by their own self-interest.

I brought up campus sexual "assaults" with a recently graduated co-ed, and her response was that two of her friends had given up their virginity to guys who had not appreciated it, and hadn't stuck around, and that somehow justified guys being expelled from college for essentially not sticking around in long term relationships with their casual bed partners. Or something like that.

Sadly, the way to "fix" these assaults is to examine the policies that have led to women outnumbering men in college pretty badly. When there are considerably more women pursuing considerably fewer men, the women have to do more to get a guy. And "doing more" is always going to be sex. College guys don't even have to do much work to get a college girl to bend over for them.

Have a more equal distribution of the sexes and this problem, largely, works itself out. Instead, it'll just be an issue for women for decades. It's not like the lack of men in college won't cause repurcussions down the line in life.

But, hey, look at the bright side: Feminists can still claim that people opposed to the Sexual Revolution were wrong. How they can say that is baffling as just about every problem in modern society was predicted years earlier, but they still will say that.

Except, Marxists, like other utopians, have always been more about repealing biological limits (or at least insisting there are no such limits) than about acknowledging that such limits might exist. Thus, the Soviet "New Soviet Man" project, and insistence on Lysenkoism.

She was an adherent to a philosophy whose perhaps most fundamental assertion is that human beings are obligated to have concern for the wellbeing of other human beings, kin and stranger alike

She was a Catholic?

(See e.g. "For the whole law is fulfilled in one word: "You shall love your neighbor as yourself."")

Look, man [linked author, not Althouse]. I don't know what weird ideas you have about Communism, but proposing its fundamental assertion is "concern for wellbeing" doesn't really fit well with any actual, existing Communist movements, Communist commentary, or Communist states.

(Oh, they do talk a lot about the material well-being of the proletariat, yes. And this is especially jarring when they try to do it today, rather than in 1848. But it's always in terms of the purely material - food, water, housing.

All fine things, no question.

But very few of us pin our own well-being purely on what Communists promise us - and Marx called his opus "Capital", not "Caring For Everyone", for a reason - Communism is an economic philosophy, not a humane one*.

I mean, I'm a materialist atheist and I call bollocks on that.

* Not that there's a damned thing wrong with having an economic philosophy first and foremost; the problems here are a) Communism is a lousy one, and b) presenting it as if it's something else.)